What is Telemedicine?

Remote patient diagnosis expands access to medical services and delivers excellent healthcare at lowered costs. Proven Telemedicine applications widely adopted today include the use of live video conferencing, transmission of still and video images from scopes and other diagnostic equipment, and remote monitoring. Telemedicine provides consistency along the continuum of care, via templated software applications. In Telemedicine there is no longer a need to transport patients over long distances to specialist sites. A timely, efficient cost-effective medical practice is delivered, providing electronic access to specialists, for physicians, healthcare providers and patients.

An effective Telemedicine platform has a positive effect in the community, improving tertiary referral patterns and lowering hospital admission rates. Physicians and providers benefit from using Telemedicine as part of their teaching curriculum, for grand rounds in affiliate hospitals and clinics. General workflow is also improved, as emergent and new patient consults may be scheduled quickly.

Telemedicine Delivery
Telemedicine is generally defined as synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous programs are those occurring in “real-time”, as demonstrable in two-way consult between a patient in concert with their medical provider and a specialist at a distant site. MD’s request clinic consults without the expense of an ambulance and without the potential complications associated with ER visits. With the use of medical cameras, video equipment, software and encryption technology, the end-result of precise audio and effective display of diagnostic data improves patient outcomes.

Asynchronous or “store and forward” distance applications are delayed communications, such as those that transfer diagnostic images or video from one site to another for viewing in preparation for a consult. Both forms are commonly used in delivering Telemedicine services. Store and forward applications are commonly used, inexpensive, and easy to use and maintain.

Synchronous programs are of critical need in remote healthcare. Medweb employs synchronous applications in Telestroke, due to the time-sensitive nature of treatment. New or recurrent strokes affect about 780,000 Americans every year. On average, someone in the United States has a stroke every 40 seconds. Within a three-hour window of symptom onset, the physician must determine the stroke diagnosis, plus the differentiation of ischemic vs. hemorrhagic stroke. Via Telestroke, such diagnosis can be made with speed and accuracy in a remote environment.

Medweb in Telemedicine
Medweb has been setting the standard in Telemedicine for 23 years with the most innovative, easy to use solutions for a variety of Government, healthcare and educational institutions. Medweb provides a scalable, patented web-based platform, fully customizable to meet the needs of clinical specialists and administrators.

The company’s core products and solutions include Teleradiology, general Telemedicine and specialty applications for Teledermatology, Teleophthalmology, Teledental, Wound Care and Stroke Evaluation. Medweb remains a technology leader in the delivery of Web-enabled, secure Telemedicine solutions. We achieve this via a DICOM and HL7 standards-based gateway comprised of a robust, highly scalable suite of peripheral device options and software applications for acquiring and reviewing images and other medical data, as well as managing the workflow associated with these tasks, from any location or via any device with an Internet connection. Medweb's Telemedicine platforms facilitate electronic acquisition, viewing, communication/transmission, publishing, and storage of medical data captured by numerous modalities and devices, and associated with the above-mentioned variety of medical subspecialties. Physicians, radiology groups, hospitals and universities around the world, as well as the US Air Force, the Navy and Army medical service and support components employ Medweb’s distributed Telemedicine offerings.

Medweb Telemedicine applications institute a common architecture for sharing patient medical records between different facilities, thus fulfilling the promise of IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) in the Health Information Exchange environment.